Optus It’s Possible in Shanghai

Optus has launched “It’s Possible”, a new brand campaign featuring a hi-tech yellow cube. The first television commercial, shot in Shanghai, China, and Canowindra, Australia, features a woman who connects with her loved one across the other side of the world in a dreamscape powered by Optus.

Click on the image below to play the Shanghai/Australia video in YouTube

The ad marks the move away from the quirky commercials featuring talking elephants, lions, monkeys and giraffes. Animals are still featured in the new campaign, but more subtly. The Shanghai/Canowindra ad features a rhino standing under the pub in Canowindra, representing Optus. There are a number of other animals embedded in the ad as Easter eggs to be discovered by sharp viewers. Another Easter egg is a spoken Mandarin phrase that translates to “My God, is that a rhinoceros?”

Fuel drew on the Kinect technology, Microsoft’s motion-sensing software used for its Xbox 360 interactive games. The Kinect camera captures the depth in a scene and with its low-resolution, ‘noisy’ visual output, was perfect for helping to achieve a digital look of the girl and her environment.

On location in Shanghai, two Kinect cameras were rigged on to an Arri Alexa digital camera, the Kinect capturing depth and the Alexa capturing colour. Lidar scans were taken of the entire streetscapes, which give long-range, detailed 3D outputs in high resolution. Further, hundreds of photogrammetry stills were also taken to support the Lidar and to give it colour information later in the process.

The visual effects team developed proprietary software that allowed for a streamlining of data acquisition from the Kinect camera to enable the production team to review the footage while on location. For production, this saved time, money and negated the need for a studio shoot.

Back at Fuel’s Newtown studio, artists used a suite of technologies to combine the elements from the Kinect data, the Alexa footage, the Lidar scans and photogrammetry to re-build a complete CG representation of the environment and the action within it, followed by the transitions from virtual to real life.

Stay Inspired

What is The Inspiration Room?

A global effort designed to influence, affect and involve creative communities in the development of a world standard for inspiration, particularly in the fields of advertising, design and film. More »